Well Designed RSS feeds – Would all web designers please stand up?
In 1997 Dave Winer developed what is known today as “RSS”. As quickly as RSS was introduced to the world, Atom was released – XML feeds have been evolving the web ever since. RSS was developed and quickly took the world by storm, but was it ever “designed”? Why are web designers around the world not stepping up the challenge; why are default browser renderings of our XML feeds determining their design, where is our visual love and the all important branding? Have we for the most part completely ignored the user-experience of feeds?
Have you ever clicked on a “subscribe” or “syndicate” link to see nothing but a standard, clunky, technically over-complicated and intimidating XML document? I can only image how Joe/Jane-User feels when first encountering this crazy thing known as XML; I have to believe the first time is intimidating and overwhelming. It actually reminds me a lot of losing your virginity – it is exciting: you’ve heard about it, you’ve read about it and you’ve even seen pictures of it; but when you’re faced with it for the first time, you are scared shitless and have no idea what to do.
I know the popular thing to use with respect to feeds is FeedBurner; primarily for its advanced user tracking utility. However, when did putting a crucial part of our site on a third party without any ability to customize the look/feel become acceptable? Would any of us put-up with this from a poll, CMS, forum or blog? In spite of losing your design, brand, originality and uniqueness, FeedBurner is a much better solution than the default! FeedBurner as well as others such as AddToAny and Feedpass offer stylized feeds – increasing the user experience ten-fold; is that enough?
I can think of at least three things that most average users need, want and expect with respect to feeds that our default isn’t providing them: the ability to view the content (in a coherent format), a method for quickly posting to their feed reader of choice, and an explanation of what the hell a “feed” is. What is stopping us from styling/branding our feeds? Is it ignorance, laziness, or simply a lack of concern for the user-experience of feeds? I don’t know that we’ve really explored the user experience of feeds at all yet. Perhaps the technology is still too much in its infancy; perhaps it is evolving too rapidly or perhaps the user-base isn’t large enough yet for us to really pay it much attention.
For those wanting to take control of your feeds and truly incorporate them into the rest of your site as well as do a service to your user-experience – there is a simple solution! Using a little XSL/XSLT magic, anyone can have a visually stylized feed! You can view my feed to see what I am talking about. I don’t mean to imply this way is “the way”; just what I believe is one step closer to enhancing the user-experience, instilling a brand and closing the digital-divide between those who get it and those new to it.
P.S. I will be posting a follow-up in the next few days on a simple and short step-by-step process I used in order to style my XML feed using XSL/XSLT.
- October 23rd, 2006
- 26comments
- I am a proud member of the 9rules network
You make some interesting points. I am in the process of building some websites and they will have some RSS feeds as part of them. I hadn’t given much thought to customising the design of them but your article has prompted me to look into it further. Cheers :)
Spuds, you have made my day! I sense that a lot of designers are over-looking their feeds and not giving them much thought. Feeds are an important part of our site and we should be treating them as such — in my opinion.
I personally hate what iTunes has done to RSS feeds. Why put your brand all over it when RSS 2.0 does the job? It is commercial insanity to use Feedburner to list a bunch of RSS clients which are capable of subscribing using the basic format. I don’t subscribe with anything other than the basic RSS2.0 feeds. The branding just makes it difficult for the citizen who is trying to get into podcasting. It should be Really Simple Syndication, period! Just use the simplest possible standard to let others see and hear what you have to say.
Do you want a 99 cent song in a propietary format with that free podcast? No thanks!
Greg, “design” can definitly be used for evil as it can be for good! I agree that some people may take my advice too far — remember, my point is to both focus on the branding of your feed and the user experience!
“Simple” is another one of those subjective terms. Too simple can be as unuseful as over-complicated. Again, we have to find that happy middle-ground.
Just do the branding on the associated web site or blog along with show notes or whatever else you want. My advice is to leave the XML as simple as possible. I maintain a web page with links to all the shows I listen to. When I hear a show that someone I know would appreciate, I use my page to find the URL which I then forward in email. I really like when podcasters provide a URL for each show. That way I can send my friends who aren’t yet podcatching to see show notes and listen on line. This is the sort of creative design that will make a show grow, not a lot of fancy XML.
Greg, you seem to be a bit of a minimalist (not a bad thing to be!). Looking at your web page, it seems as though you even like to keep the HTML as simple as possible — judging by the fact you’ve got no style sheet.
I can see how you want to keep the XML as clean as possible — my main argument is that the default rendering of XML isn’t very helpful to most users. You can’t click links, it isnt very read-able and some of the useful items you might want to be associated are not available. It isn’t XML’s intention to be that useful, but should that stop us?
Dave Shea from MezzoBlue has also done a bit of experimenting with a formatted RSS page and written a little about it here.
Speaking for all the lowly amateurs out there, perhaps we don’t style our feeds because we don’t know how! And there doesn’t seem to be many tutorials out there on how to do it (although I haven’t looked that hard; styling the RSS feed ends up pretty low on the priority scale when you’re your website is just for fun).
I like your solution. Do most feed reader programs ignore (and not waste time loading) the style sheet, top section and navigation parts?
I think the main problem with styling rss feeds is that many will simply view it as another news page. The target audience of styling the feed is mainly the uninitiated, the web neophyte - the demographic most likely to be confused as to the purpose of such a page. How then will they differenciate a regular news page from an rss feed?
The strange xml markup can be seen almost as a signature, a telling sign that the url being viewed is an rss feed. Eliminating this visual que may only complicate matters. Perhaps a better solution is to simply place an introduction to rss at the top of the page, along with instructions on how to add the feed to their rss reader.
Jack, you make some good points worth noting. Take a look at my feed and tell me what you think. Do I confuse or not? Am I hurting or helping the user-experience is the real question. I am seriously asking for your opinion and analysis.
I think that you make it very clear that the page is an rss feed. The instructions are a nice touch and I don’t think anyone would be confused.
I actually prefer your implementation to David Shea’s, as his disclaimer is easily missed. I tend to read the main content and ignore the sidebars. It took a few seconds before it occured to me to read his instructions.
Appreciate it! If anyone else has good examples of personalized and stylized feeds — please share.
Greg, you seem to be a bit of a minimalist
“Guilty as charged.“
Actually, I could even more easily have read all my RSS feeds into an RSS reader such as Wiz RSS (a Firefox plug-in). I can reach web pages from there, but I often don’t like the web page included in the RSS feed, so I rolled my own web page to be able to reach a particular show as quickly as possible. I often send friends there if they seem to share interests in common with me. It’s not meant to be fancy or sell anything, but to promote what I consider to be the best in podcasting to a small circle of friends and acquaintances.
The only way your feed deviates from the standard are a couple of header lines containing a link to your xml-stylesheet. I’m sure there is a lot of work behind the scene, but it seems like a minimal deviation from the standard RSS feed to me.
Not bad.
I use a php script to display my XML. Here is an example. It uses an html template and fills the XML item entries into a table. It is pretty spartan, but it is very easy to propagate new ones for whatever purpose I discover along the way.
Greg, you are right on! Notice my emphasis on “simple solution“. I don’t typically recommend solutions that are not at least 10 minutes away from being solved.
Definitly not hiding any secrets, most of you should be able to figure out what I am doing simply by viewing source — that is how I figured it out in the first place. I will write a small post on how to do in a few days for those interested.
“Have you ever clicked on a “subscribe” or “syndicate” link to see nothing but a standard, clunky, technically over-complicated and intimidating XML document?“
Maybe back in the day, but now in Safari (and perhaps the latest alphas of Camino), clicking a “subscribe” link pops open a sheet in NetNewsWire asking me if I want to subscribe. Perfect. RSS is meant to be consumed by machines, so I never really got the point of styling it–if you want people to see it directly, make it an HTML page!
So my comment is either, “Maybe we should put pressure on browsers to handle RSS feeds better” or “Am I missing something here?”
Garak, I was waiting for this comment; thanks for bringing it up. I will first start by saying that this post is primarily concerned with “Joe/Jane User” – the typical and non-technical user who is most likely on Internet Explorer (I know this is highly debatable).
I will say this ….. we should not be depending on the browser to style our content – regardless of what that content may be. It is to us to utilize technologies such as CSS, XSL and XSLT to control the presentation of our code. When did any designer depend on the default rendering of content to be their design?
Sure, browsers can definitely improve – but lets not become dependant on them.
Just to chime in: I’m cruising in a fresh new install of Firefox 2.0. One of the new options available is to bypass this inherent difficulty. You can tell it to
A) Show a preview of the feed, with a handy drop-down menu asking which feed reader you use
or
B) Have it auto-subscribe using the reader of your choice, bypassing the preview altogether.
This obviously doesn’t solve the problem for the majority of web surfers (IE), but I think it is a sign of things to come. With IE7, Microsoft is showing that they want to be at least as good as the rest of the browsers, and I doubt they’ll rest on their laurels now that there really is some competition. Even if IE is going to be playing catchup for a while (as other browsers implement new features while IE copies them) at least they’re moving forward.
Well…. shit! I just upgraded to FF 2.0 (I usually wait a week — for my extensions to catch up) and now I am really pissed!!
When I view my feed in FF 2.0, they attach their own style sheet completely overriding the XSLT I created for my customized look/feel. Talk about bad timing for this article; really pointless as the audience of my blog would most likely be using Safari or FF 2.0.
I’m gonna go spend some time on Google and figure out how to get past this. I think FF 2.0 is doing a great job; but I liked my way :(
“When did any designer depend on the default rendering of content to be their design?“
I think the way you pose this question, and the tone of your comment in general, shows that maybe we’re looking at feeds differently. To me, feed items are just data. They shouldn’t have a “default rendering” any more than a SOAP message should. By the time a user (one who’s using RSS properly, at least) looks at a feed item, it’s been chopped up and mixed in with other feed items and displayed in any of a hundred different ways. So there’s no way–and shouldn’t be a way–to style a whole feed. As a matter of fact, people really shouldn’t be looking at whole feeds anyway. They should be whisked away automatically to something that knows how to display them properly. Browsers that don’t do that aren’t “styling our content,” they’re panicking and vomiting data on the screen.
As an aside, it’s worth noting that if you’re serving your feeds with the proper MIME type, and the browser doesn’t know how to handle that MIME type (which I think should be the case with any non-feed-aware browser), it’ll pop up a dialog box asking you if you want to download the file, making the whole idea of styling whole feeds mute. But that’s just Mark Pilgrim talking, so forget I said it :)
Maybe the points I’m raising are too academic, anyway. In the real world, people are going to be seeing feeds. But perhaps our solutions to the problem differ. Your feed looks great, but I think it blends in too well with the rest of your site. To me, one of those RSS-savvy enlightened types, it takes a few blinks to realize what I’m looking at. And I’m not sure that blurring the line between regular pages and feeds helps users, either, for the same reason.
So I think the best solution is somewhere in between. If somehow some IE user wanders into a feed, he should see a styled page that perhaps retains the color scheme and most basic brand elements of the site, but looks less like another page of article summaries and more like the data that it is. Maybe a honking yellow banner that says “Hey, this is a feed, not a regular page. You subscribe to it in a feed reader…” and so on.
In any case, for all your effort, your beautiful design vanishes when an aggregator chops it up, and the user’s back to looking at an unbranded feed! The real trick is to solve the branding issue once the feed is out of the browser. Does the standard supports some way to keep a set of styles intact when the items are read in an aggregator?
Garak — wow, what an intense read, well worth it though. Thanks for the insight. You make a lot of valid points and have got me thinking.
I don’t know if there is a way to style the “content” of a feed once it leaves the site and enters some like a reader or aggregator. I don’t even know if that is something I would want (so many branding elements from a variety of sites could visually clutter).
Now you’ve got me thinking ……
Good post, a couple of minor quibbles:
1. RSS really dates to 1999 and some work Netscape did on their old portal. Winer’s work in 1997 was his own “scriptingNews” format. Once Netscape started working on RSS 0.90, Winer got them to integrate some of his elements into their format and Winer became a big champion of RSS. Microsoft had another format, Channel Definition Format (CDF), that they offered in 1997, too. (It went nowhere)
2. Atom didn’t really show up until 2003, so it’s really a fairly recent addition to the syndication space. Prior to that the real battle in syndication land was between RSS 0.90/0.91/0.92/0.93/2.0 and RSS 1.0. RSS 1.0 came onto the scene in 2000 and was a significant departure from the previous versions of RSS, mainly because it was an implementation of the W3C Resource Description Framework (RDF) and made extensive use of namespaces which made some folks itchy. While in many ways Atom and RSS 1.0 are more technically elegant, the Winer strains of RSS have always been more popular because they are (generally) easier to grok and produce.
2. Depending on your FeedBurner plan, you can have complete control over the look/feel of your RSS, i.e. you can use FeedBurner and also use your own custom XSLT to display it. The only thing currently that I haven’t been able to control is the .ico that gets served: it’s always the FeedBurner icon.
3. You don’t need XSLT to format your RSS. You can format any XML in the browser with plain-jane CSS. Instead of using XHTML elements for the selectors, just use the element names for whatever XML you’re styling. For designers, it’s an interesting exercise/challenge to style an RSS feed without the ability to add elements at all via an XSLT transformation.
Another example of a styled feed page: RSS Feed for Penny-Arcade.
Very minimal design, but it makes the feed human-readable and gives the user working links.
This week IBM’s DeveloperWorks site published an article about this topic that is pretty good, especially pointing out a potential problem and solution when using XSLT to display feeds in FireFox.
Thanks for the link Mark.
I also wanted to thank you for the insightful comments above. I had a great lengthy reply, but then Blogger (damn you Blogger) was down for an hour and it never posted — I am way to lazy to re-type it now.
Moving to WordPress after Thanksgiving (start the new year fresh).
XML Parsing Error: undefined entity
Location: http://www.marylandmedia.com/feed/
Line Number 21, Column 36:
Thanks “T”, have no idea what caused that — all is working, just re-published the file (manually)